Sigourney Weaver told a French television show (Le Grande Journal, for those of you looking to season pass it on your TiVos) that she'll be back for Avatar 2.

[start spoiler alert for the seven people who haven't seen Avatar, yet haven't already made up their minds that they'll hate it]

Which is funny since her character died and all. The interwebs are speculating on the involvement from one of three angles. First, Cameron has hinted that the second film might be a prequel, so presumably we'll get to see how Colonel Quaritch turned to the dark side. Second, it's possible that her character's brain wave pattern memory biotechnobabble really did get saved to the magic tree hard drives. Like, they found a backup over in the other alternate grove or some such, the one that the sysadmin had forgotten to reboot when the power came back on. Third, it's always possible that her words are only a loose approximation of any actual plans. I know at least 3/4 of the things I say on French television are exaggerations, if not outright lies.

Even more exciting is the news that the trailer for Resident Evil 4 will show in front of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Four? Seriously, I can only remember there being two previous ones. The red dress one and the Las Vegas one. Apparently there was another one in between those two. Who knew? I'll tell you who. The people that forked over money so that the three films to date have made almost $400 million total. Since they've only burned $120 million to make those three films, and Milla Jovovich ain't exactly departing for a Fourth Kind or Fifth Element franchise any time soon, they're just going to keep making these over and over again. At least if Paul Anderson is producing these, he's not producing other things, so that might be a net positive.

The BBC just announced that it will be creating a film in the style of 300 showing the destruction of the Minoan civilization. They're calling it Atlantis because anyone who's heard of the Minoans probably has already heard the story and seen the History Channel documentaries on the subject anyway. So the Minoans (for those of you who don't watch the History Channel for 12 hours a day on vacation) had this nifty island civilization that had a golden age a little while before the Greeks became the really cool kids in ancient Mediterranean history.

Then the island blew up.

Heh, I bet that hurt the ratings of their resorts on Expedia. What, too soon? Historians are pretty sure that this is the historical basis for the Atlantis myth though, so of course, they're also releasing a companion documentary that looks at Plato's description of the sinking of Atlantis as supporting evidence. Which is sort of like using Braveheart as a reference for the Scottish wars of independence. I'm not entirely sure what's gained by claiming that it's in the style of 300 either, other than prompting the obvious visualization of some guy yelling "This! Is! Minoa!" at an erupting volcano.

Eh, but PR snarking aside, it just doesn't sound like anything much different than a run of the mill History Channel special.